Cemetery Quotes

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have
invariably recognized it among their earliest practical
necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a
cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Running a cemetery isjust like being President: you got a lot of people under
you and nobody's listening.

Quoted by Bill
Clinton,10 Jan1995.

Because he attempted to tell (his painting ['The Jewish cemetery'] that which is outside the reach of art... there are ruins to indicate old age, a stream to signify the course of life, and rocks and precipices to shadow forth its dangers. But how are we to discover all this?

Yes, it'll be 150, Forest Lawn cemetery, in the back of a Ford pickup.

Who: Dick Trickle Note: From a 911 call asking who was going to commit suicide. Trickle responded with "I'm the one." His granddaughter, who died in a car accident, was buried in the same cemetery.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Though man's feeling for the other-worldly often has recourse to solitude, solitude does not foster its development; rather, it is nourished by communion, to which the church is more propitious than the cemetery.

"Grim death took me without any warningI was well at night and dead at nine in the morning"

The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.

Pope John Paul II, The Observer, June 9, 1991.

If it wasn't for baseball, I'd be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery. I have the same violent temper my father and older brother had. Both died of injuries from street fights in Baltimore, fights begun by flare-ups of their tempers.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

Harold Wilson, Speech to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France (January 23, 1967); reported in The New York Times (January 24, 1967), p. 12.

Yesterday we came across a cemetery that had been completely destroyed by shellfire. The graves had been blown up, and the coffins lay about in the most uncomfortable positions. The shells had unceremoniously exposed their distinguished occupants to the light of day, and bones, hair, and bits of clothing could be seen through cracks in the burst-open coffins.

True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.

In certain tantric rituals the candidate is first beaten by his guru, hashish forced down him, and he is taken at midnight to a dark cemetery for sacred sexual intercourse. Thus he achieves union with his god.

I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua ; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.

The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.

Source: Unborn Word of the Day

A child wandering in a cemetery, after reading the effusive inscriptions, all too superfluous after the statement that a dead man is below, asks where the bad people are buried. A reader of reports, searching for authority, sighs that so much is said when so much less would amply suffice.

Author unidentified.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.